Robert Colvile is a writer and senior comment editor at the Telegraph, who cares more about politics and policy than is probably healthy - for his newest pieces, please see here. He tweets as @rcolvile.

I'm going to hell – and you're coming too

Sorry to trespass on Damian Thompson's turf, but ever since I was a small, not very well-behaved child, I've felt that if there's a hell, I'm probably heading there – not for any one great sin, but for a lifetime of walking by on the other side, of spending weekends lounging on the sofa when I could have been helping my fellow man.

Feeling the burn – can weÂ escape eternal damnation?

How nice to know that according to one leading theologian, you'll all be joining me.

Richard Turnbull is the principal of Wycliffe Hall, the theological college. He's also the man who claimed (but now sort-of denies) that 95 per cent of Britons are going straight to hell, do not pass go, do not collect your eternal reward.

Hell seems to be in fashion at the moment – the Pope recently insisted that, in his eyes at least, it wasÂ an actual physical place to which you are indeed condemned for eternity.

That's even worse than the more conventional interpretation, that hell is the spiritual agony of being deprived of God's presence (as Marlowe's devil had it, in one of the few lines I remember from English GCSE, "Think'st thou that I, who saw the face of God and tasted the eternal joys of heaven, am not tormented by ten thousand hells in being deprived of everlasting bliss?").

Yet the idea of eternal judgment – of this life as a testing ground for the next – seems woefully out of fashion, given that (in the West, at least) we live in what previous generations might well see as a kind of heaven: no food shortages, no plague, plentiful heating, endless entertainment.

Similarly, the strict Calvinist idea of predestination, on which evangelicals such as Dr Turnbull base their calculations, is utterly antithetical to our all-men-created-equal politics.

It's hard to understand how important, and contentious, this concept used to be.

A cause of arguments, schisms and even wars for centuries, it says that heaven is essentially a tiny, exclusive country club from which the vast majority are excluded.

The "elect" are born to be saved, but the rest of us – no matter how virtuous our lives – will be excluded on the basis of having insufficient, or the wrong kind of faith.

It's a vision of heaven as an ultra-snobbish public school, in which the names are put down at birth – and also the philosophy behind the nauseating American idea of the Rapture, the moment at the end of the world when the saved are physically raised up to heaven, smiling smugly as the rest of us wail and burn.

This is one of the reasons why I profoundly dislike evangelicalism. Although I believe in a Creator, I'm well aware that what brand of religion you plump for is overwhelmingly determined by when and where you grew up.

Would a loving God cast aside all those people who were born on the wrong continent, or in the wrong century, to hear Jesus's message?

If he is, and going to heaven means being surrounded by self-satisfied happy-clappies for centuries on end, put me down for somewhere a bit warmer.